Q3 2026 Updates: Personalized Planning with Iris™ and More

Clients rarely fit neatly into a template. Where one client is comparing Medicare options ahead of retirement, another is juggling stock grants from a new employer, and a third wants to know whether paying off debt faster is worth it. Good planning means giving each of them advice that reflects their actual situation, without spending hours on setup.

This quarter, RightCapital shipped more than a dozen updates to help advisors find specific planning opportunities faster, model complex situations more precisely, and spend less time on data entry. Iris™, RightCapital’s AI financial planning agent, can now review a plan to surface opportunities and analyze client documents. An enhanced Health Care module makes retirement health care costs easier to estimate and explain. New options for cash withdrawal timing, debt strategies, and life insurance planning allow advisors to build strategies around how each client handles money and risk. CSV uploads speed up entering budget transactions and stock grants, and student loan modeling now reflects the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Whether you already use RightCapital or you're evaluating planning software for your firm, here's a closer look at what's new:

Expanded capabilities for Iris, RightCapital's AI financial planning agent

Iris™ already helps advisors get answers from a client's plan in seconds with planning presets such as Double Check, Cash Flow Review, and Plan Builder. Two new features this quarter make Iris an even stronger planning partner.

Find opportunities

Find Opportunities is a new planning preset that reviews a client's plan and points out where more planning could help. You can specify a planning focus area, such as Tax, Investments, Retirement, Insurance, Debt, Stock Plans, Business, and Estate, or choose multiple for a broader review. Iris then identifies potential strategies within those selected focus areas that are tailored to that client.

Upload documents for further analysis

Document upload allows you to drop files right into an Iris conversation and ask for a summary or ask questions about them. Advisors can use this feature to:

• Make sense of complex documents: Upload files such as annuity illustrations, stock grants, benefit summaries, or insurance policies, and Iris will turn the details into clear planning insights that fit into the overall plan.
• Prepare for meetings faster: Share new statements, tax documents, or portfolio updates, and ask Iris what has changed, what matters, and what you may want to revisit.
• Work with the client's Vault: Iris can reference documents already stored in a client's Vault. It can also compare a Vault document with a newly uploaded file to spot the differences.

As always, ask the Iris chat whatever follow-up questions you have to better understand a finding, dive deeper into delivered insights, or learn how a change could affect the client’s plan.

Retirement health care planning, reimagined

Enhanced Health Care module

RightCapital’s Medicare module has been enhanced and renamed Health Care, with new tools to estimate retirement health care costs and compare coverage options on three tabs:

• Cost Analysis: Show projected health care expenses across the stages of retirement, including an annual breakdown of pre-Medicare costs, Medicare premiums, out-of-pocket costs, and other medical expenses
• Medicare Options: Dive deeper into Medicare option comparisons, including side-by-side coverage and cost considerations, enrollment periods, practical tips for Medicare discussions, and more
• Preferences: Fine-tune considerations that would impact each client's Medicare coverage needs and enrollment period

Additionally, customize the Health Care section of the PDF report by choosing specific pages, rearranging the order, and selecting which household members to include.

More detailed estimates

We also added more ways to model Retirement Health Costs. In place of the Detailed Estimate option within the Retirement Health Cost card, advisors can now choose between Original Medicare, Medicare + Medigap, or Medicare Advantage w/ prescription drug coverage. The national average and custom amount options are still available, and you can now use state averages for pre-Medicare and out-of-pocket costs.

Budgeting with less busywork

A good budget starts with complete, accurate transaction data, but collecting that data can take a lot of time. New budgeting tools help advisors get a client's spending picture in place faster.

Bank and credit card accounts linked through account aggregation pull in transactions, and now advisors can add manual transactions to these accounts as well. That makes it possible to record activity from before the account was linked and extend a client’s financial history.

Advisors can now import transactions in bulk with a CSV file. For recurring entries, an existing transaction can be duplicated and used as a starting point for a new one.

More personalized debt strategies

Every client's debt situation is different, and a payoff strategy should reflect that. Updates to the Debt module give advisors more ways to tailor the plan, making it easy to show clients what paying a little more each month could save them in the end:

• Set custom monthly payments for each debt: Choose a specific monthly payment for each liability in the debt module’s action items for the clients where this strategy makes sense
• Model extra payments to individual debts: Add and adjust extra debt payments to individual debts to see how they might affect payoff timing, interest savings, and payment schedules
• See where every dollar goes: The “payments over time” chart shows how payments are split between principal and interest, for either all debts together or one account at a time

Keep cash as a last line of defense

Many clients want their cash untouched until there’s nothing else to draw on. A plan should reflect that. With a new cash withdrawal timing option, advisors can indicate that a client’s cash should be spent only after all invested assets are used up. If a client’s spending exceeds income, the plan draws on investments first, and the cash stays put as a safety net until everything else is gone. Advisors can still choose to spend cash before or after taxable investments for clients who prefer that approach.

More flexible life insurance planning

The timing of a death matters a great deal, both for how much life insurance a family needs and for what the rest of the plan has to cover. With this quarter’s updates, advisors can set exactly when a death happens in the plan and add new goals, expenses, and other changes that come with it. That gives you a realistic picture of how a family's life could shift and how those shifts affect life insurance needs, so you can lead these hard conversations with clarity and care.

When it's time to present, the Life Insurance section of the PDF report is now more customizable. Choose which pages to include, rearrange them, and select which household members and years to show.

Faster equity compensation and retirement savings modeling

Clients with equity compensation often hold many grants, each with its own details. Setting up stock plans in RightCapital is now much faster, as advisors can upload grants by CSV, copy existing grants, and build custom vesting schedules right in the client's plan.

For workplace retirement savings, advisors can now use an additional contribution escalation option for traditional and Roth 401(k), 403(b), 457(b), and similar employer-sponsored retirement plans. When contributions are set as a percentage of salary, set how much the savings rate increases each year and when the increases stop.

The 401(k) and Roth 401(k) loan entry has been moved to a new, dedicated New Loan income card.

Student loan updates per the One Big Beautiful Bill Act

RightCapital now includes the student loan provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Advisors can model the new federal income-driven Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP). The SAVE and PAYE plans can no longer be proposed in client plans. As of October 1, 2026, existing loans enrolled in SAVE have moved to the Standard repayment calculation unless another eligible plan was selected. Loans on PAYE will stay on PAYE until July 1, 2028, and then move to RAP automatically unless you choose another option.

Small improvements that add up in your daily workflow

We also made several updates to make RightCapital easier to use every day:

• Choose your default landing page: Set up your Advisor Portal to open on either the Dashboard or the Planning tab
• Better household search: Search across several household groups at once, with your selections saved for next time
• Customizable idle session timeout: Choose how long to stay logged in while inactive, from 30 minutes up to 4 hours
• Reopen completed tasks: Mark a completed task as incomplete so you can update it and complete it again

See it for yourself

Every update this quarter has the same goal: to help advisors deliver deeper, more personalized planning in less time. From AI-driven insights with Iris to more precise modeling for health care, insurance, debt, and equity compensation, RightCapital keeps getting more useful for you and your clients.

Ready to see what RightCapital can do for your practice? Schedule a demo today.